


The Bleak Shore

by skytramp



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Family, Gen, Mermaids, Near Drowning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-02-16 20:27:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18698572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skytramp/pseuds/skytramp
Summary: Lou watched as Helen gestured, as if having a strained conversation with the waves. She liked to imagine Grandma Helen could talk to the fish.Louise "Lou" Brown returned to the island of Monhegan, off the coast of Maine, twenty five years ago when her grandmother passed away and became a commercial fisherman. It's old family legend that someone or somethingwatches out for them here, and it keeps drawing them back to the island.





	The Bleak Shore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimikani](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimikani/gifts).



The ocean was calm while Lou checked her nets in the afternoon light. She pushed aside the flopping piles of fish, looking for anything that didn’t look like mackerel before dumping the lot through the hole to below deck. It was a slow process: setting the nets close to the shoal, waiting for the mackerel to swim into the waiting trap, engaging the power block’s hydraulic engine to pull the (hopefully full) net back to the boat, and hoisting its treasures above the deck for examination. It could be faster if Lou didn’t work alone, but out here on Monhegan there wasn’t much in the way of hirable crew. 

  
She wasn’t looking to hire anyhow. Lou had been fishing alone off the coasts of Monhegan for fifteen years, and for ten before that she worked with a commercial crew out of Yellowhead, just long enough to buy the boat of her own. The boat was nearly as old as Lou herself, a swarthy purse seiner that had come with a half rusted engine that Lou painstakingly rebuilt. It was sturdy though, and Lou wouldn’t trade it for anything, not for riches, not for fame, not for another 48 years on this planet.  
  


Her first 48 hadn’t exactly been kind to her, but she no longer minded the way her short blonde hair went ashy grey, and the extra weight around her torso and hips helped with the cold Maine winters spent on the deck of her boat. She had strong muscles too, even if she woke up most mornings with the type of soreness that only came from age. It was late afternoon by the time the catch was stowed, not nearly enough time to make another draw before nightfall, so Lou began stowing her nets for the trip back to shore.   
  


She felt the storm before she saw it: an uneasy rolling of the waves. It sent the boat pitching sideways and caused even Lou’s sturdy sea legs to stumble. Next she felt the rain, and before she even had the chance to cover her head she was soaked. She unsteadily made her way to the wheel in the small bridge at the front of the boat, shoving through the narrow doorway. Everything around her was chaos. Waves crested at fifteen feet, the sky was now dark as dusk, and wind whipped around and into the bridge, blowing her soaking hair in all directions.   
  


She set the anchor to retract and felt when it dislodged by the uncomfortable roll of the deck as the waves pushed it freely. It wouldn’t be too hard to steer, she hoped, but already the engine was whining, struggling to compensate for the extra stress of the swirling waves around them. Working with the twist of the waves Lou was able to steer the boat in the direction of shore. She pushed the lever forward, taking the risk of accelerating in hopes of outrunning the storm itself.   
  


A sparkle of something in her periphery, a reflection of not-quite-water off the port side of the boat caught her eye. It looked the color of pale flesh, and in that split second it didn’t seem to move like a fish. Lou yanked the accelerator to a stop and dropped anchor before she could think twice. Someone was out there, caught in this freak storm same as her, but they didn’t have a boat. She’d never forgive herself if she left them to drown. She ran out of the bridge, slamming her shoulder on the door frame on the way, and began scanning the water for signs of life.   
  


“Hello?!” She yelled in hopes of hearing a response over the roar of the wind and waves. She searched the roiling water around the boat, looking from hull to horizon in the hopes of catching sight of the person again. The boat pitched, “Hel--!” and her shout was cut off by the sudden tilt in the deck, throwing her chest first into the metal railing and knocking the wind from her lungs.  
  


In a dazed moment, gasping for air, she caught sight of the person again. They were only twenty or so feet out, a flash of flailing limbs above the water line. Lou wrestled with the circular life preserver, pulling it from the exterior wall of the bridge. She made sure the rope was secured on both ends and flung it like a giant frisbee out to the sea.   
  


The preserver hit the water before it sailed far enough to reach the space where Lou had seen the struggling person. She scrambled for the wet rope and began pulling, yanking the ring to try and throw it again. The waves resisted, and it took all her strength just to pull on the rope… until it didn’t. The rope came loose, life preserver having bounced free of the wave and it sent Lou sprawling backwards. She tumbled, losing her grip on the rope, and her shoulder glanced off the railing just before she hit the water.   
  


The water of the north Atlantic was cold, even in July, and Lou felt the heat seeping through her skin. She felt her thick flannel shirt, cargo shorts, and heavy boots weighing her down, she felt her lungs burning at the strain of holding her single gasped breath hostage. The waves tossed her in all directions, and she swam, using every bit of her strength in the hopes of finding the surface. The water was dark, swirling and pushing, and she no longer had any sense of the surface. She was shoved back and she felt the pain splintering out from the base of her skull as the waves tossed her against the metal hull of her own boat. The deep dark of unconsciousness found her as she gasped, hopelessly, for air. 

  
  


The dock, just down the slight hill from her grandmother’s house, was all sun bleached boards and salt-stained pilings. Louise, ten years old, bright eyed and curious in her mud stained shorts white ruffled blouse, sat in the grass, pulling daisies and watching the sea. Grandma Helen stood on the dock, silhouetted against the bright blue sky. Lou watched as Helen gestured, as if having a strained conversation with the waves. She liked to imagine Grandma Helen could talk to the fish, and when Lou saw them, the figure in the water, dive away with a disgruntled flap of a large dolphin-like tail, she felt she was right.   
  


When she asked Grandma Helen who was in the water, the only answer was ‘ _ an old friend’ _ .

  
  


It was dark when Lou opened her eyes. Even before the waves she heard her own scratchy intake of breath, her own heart beating in her aching chest. She was damp, no longer soaking but not quite dry, and rocks dug into her back where she lay. She heard the ocean then; close, but not so close it felt like danger. When she opened her eyes she saw it was night and a half full moon had risen into the sky. Whatever storm had struck was passed, or it had never reached Monhegan proper at all, and the night sky was as clear as it had been before the storm. Lou made it to her feet, looked around and recognized where she was. The rocky north eastern beach of the island, only half a mile from her own home. Her boots squished with the water in their soles as she began walking, seemingly uninjured, in what could only be described as a miracle.   
  


She saw the two men standing outside her front door from 200 feet away. When they noticed her she heard one man yell “Lou, is that you?”.   
  


Jarvis was twenty years older than Lou if he was day, and had been fishing these waters twice as long. Lou first met him during her childhood summers spent on Monhegan with her Grandmother. He was a good friend, and he hobbled quick as she’d ever seen him move to gather her up in a bony hug.   
  


“We thought you were dead!” He growled, his thick downeast Maine accent rendering his words into an emotional slur.   
  


“Nearly was.” Lou grunted back, and she felt the burn in her throat from the words. “Did you see that storm? Nearly capsized me on the shoals. Knocked me overboard.” Then she remembered why she'd been so near the edge of the boat to begin with. “Was anybody else caught in the storm? Anybody missing from the island?”  
  


Jarvis shook his head, pulling back from the hug but keeping a firm grip on Lou’s shoulders. They were about the same height. “Found your boat out there, drifting loose, empty as anything aside from your catch in the belly. Thought for certain the sea had swallowed you, but we towed her back to your dock all the same. Didn't see anyone else out there though, and I haven't heard about anyone else missing. Why do you ask?”  
  


Lou looked then, down the slight hill to her left where the sun-bleached dock, almost glowing in the moonlight, sat, she saw her boat tied alongside. She breathed a sigh of relief for her boat that was almost painful in its intensity, though the worry for whoever she saw in the sea still gnawed at her.   
  


“Thought I saw someone in the water. Could have sworn someone got washed out in that storm surge and I… Well, once I fell over I didn't see them again.” Lou looked down and back up, Jarvis didn't take his eyes off her. “Just keep an ear out, will you? I'd like to know who it was at least.”  
  


Jarvis nodded and walked with her, covering the slight distance to her front door where the other man stood. Tony was a quiet man with a large beard that covered half his face and chest. He worked with Jarvis offshore sometimes, but spent a lot of time alone as well. Lou didn’t know him well and was surprised to see him here, seemingly lamenting her loss.  
  


“You alive, then?” Tony asked as they approached, and Jarvis gave Lou a hefty clap on the shoulder as she nodded.   
  


“It’s a miracle.” Jarvis said in response.   
  


“The Ouellette luck, always got someone looking out for you.” Tony said, and he looked off towards the sea.   
  


“I’m a Brown, myself, Tony. Grandma Helen was the last Ouellette, the name died with her.” Lou responded. She’d heard this old wives tale bandied around throughout her time here: the Ouellettes made deals with the spirits, with gods, with the ocean herself, there was a reason Ouellettes never left Monhegan, and if they did they always returned. Lou proved that much, she realized, though she was born Louise Brown, the folks of Monhegan would always see her as an Ouellette.   
  


“You’ve got her blood in you, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” Tony said, and his ominous tone made Lou uncomfortable enough that she shrugged Jarvis’ hand off her shoulder and took a step closer to her front door.   
  


“Alright, Tony.” Lou said dismissively, opening the door. She hovered in the doorway. “You and your superstition can head home now. You too, Jarvis. I appreciate you towing the boat in, I really do. But I gotta sleep off this half-drowning now, I’ve got a headache that won’t quit.   
  


The old men nodded, and Jarvis laughed, but Tony stared through her as if watching a ghost. Lou closed the door and hardly made it to her bed before succumbing to sleep.  
  


The dream started much like the last one. Lou, in the grassy front yard of the home she now owned, Grandma Helen, blue dress flapping in the salty Atlantic wind, standing on the dock down the hill. Lou watched Helen gesture, heard scraps of words caught in the wind and brought to her ears. Then the wind was louder, and then it was cold. Lou was struggling through the waves, looking for the surface in a vain struggle for survival. Her boots felt full of lead, dragging her to the sea floor. She saw a darkness in her periphery, a figure swimming alongside her, and a pair of hands reached out to pull her from the depths. She heard Tony’s voice, swirling through the waves around her,  _ “The Ouellette Luck”. _  
  
  


The first thing Lou noticed upon waking was her thirst. Her throat felt like it was full of sand, and even when she had drunk an entire glass of water from the tap she still felt it. The hunger hit her next, but the simple feeling of needing food after missing dinner was a familiar comfort. When she looked outside she realized it was barely after dawn, and the gulls were just beginning their morning calls. Lou made herself some breakfast, showered, and dressed for the day. She would love nothing more than to get back in bed and rest after yesterday, but more pressing than her own needs was examining the state her boat was in after being battered by the storm and left to drift for who knows how long.  
  


The sun was fully in the sky, but it shone dully through the bank of low clouds that had rolled in from the sea. Lou emerged from her small house and she looked down towards the sea. Through the mist she could barely see her boat, tied awkwardly to a piling on the old dock. The morning was chilly and the fog clinged to her skin, but the waves were gentle where they rolled against the rocky shore. Lou made the short trip down to the boat and her boots knocked against the old wood.   
  


She tried not to think about the day before, or her dreams in the night. Reliving nearly drowning was one thing, but seeing her grandmother, as she was in Lou’s childhood, tied a knot deep down in her chest. It was nearly twenty years ago that Helen had died, she was seventy eight years old. Thinking about her in Lou’s childhood, Helen was probably only a decade older than Lou now, and that was a strange thought. Lou didn’t have many photos of her grandmother, but she imagined if she did the resemblance would be obvious.   
  


The boat was surprisingly unharmed. Lou first checked the hull for signs of damage, for water leaks on the interior, and found a few possible new scuff marks and scratches but nothing serious. She’d lost an entire net, which wouldn’t be cheap to replace, but she had an older one to use in the meantime, she would just have to make some simple repairs. The power block looked intact, and when she ran the hydraulic engine it started without issue. Lou’s breath caught and she coughed, loud and painfully, feeling the soreness in her chest. The sound from the power block tapered off as Lou’s coughing continued, undisguised, for a few more seconds. In the near-silence that followed she heard a voice from somewhere off behind her.   
  


“Are you alright?” The voice called, vaguely feminine with an accent that didn’t sound local. The way the fog changed sounds made it so that Lou could not really tell what direction the voice had come from.   
  


Lou turned towards the dock and saw no one nearby. She took a few more steps, and crossed the short plank to the dock. She could just see the shore through the misty air, but no one was around, and she dismissed the voice as a trick of the waves. Perhaps it was a voice carried from another part of the island, fog catching and carrying the sound like a series of narrow tunnels. Just as she turned back towards the boat she heard the voice again, this time closer, with the same foreign accent, enunciating the Rs in a way one didn’t hear much on Monhegan.   
  


“What is your name?”  
  


Lou looked back towards the shore and then she saw it. At first she thought it was someone swimming, just head and shoulders bobbing above the water line about twenty feet out from the dock in the middling shallows, but something was different. She took a few steps down the dock towards the figure and looked closer. Half obscured by the fog over the water, she could see the skin was dark, but not brown, it was a deep blue with white-gray splotches covering the lower half of the face and down the neck, and it looked less porous than human skin, something like a whale. The face looked mostly human, with soft feminine features, though it was as hairless as any sea creature.   
  


The creature did not speak again, so she answered its question. “I’m Lou.”  
  


The creature’s face moved slightly, in acknowledgement perhaps, and it swam closer, now only ten feet from the edge of the dock where Lou stood. She could see it more clearly now and the face held a certain intelligence that she could not deny.   
  


“Are you alright?” It, or perhaps she, asked. Lou understood that this was the question she had heard the first time. The voice was slow and deliberate, but carried the short distance between them easily. “I heard the…” her voice trailed off, and she lifted one mostly white hand, and it was a hand, to her mouth and mimed coughing with a strange choked off noise that resembled an actual cough more as artistic representation than mimicry. “I heard that.”  
  


Lou wasn’t sure how to respond. This felt like a dream, or some old fisherman’s tale come to life. She looked around, trying to anchor herself in reality. The same shore, which she could barely see, and beyond it, out of sight surely laid the same house she’d spent the last twenty five years living in, to her left was the same boat she’d bought with every scrap of savings after a decade as a skiff operator on that old Yellowhead seiner. No, this was entirely real, it had to be, and this sentient, english speaking sea creature had asked her a question.  
  


“Yes, I’m…” She cleared her throat, and in that moment realized something. “You’re who I saw yesterday! I nearly drowned trying to save you, a… what are you?” Her voice was louder than she needed to be, and she was angry at this mess. She almost died trying to save a what? A mermaid? Surely something that didn’t need her help at any rate.  
  


She swam closer, and Lou flinched back at the sudden approach. Lou saw a splash that must have come from her feet, or her tail? Lou couldn’t see through the water to tell what was beneath. “I saved  _ you _ !” She said, and raised her hand to point in Lou’s direction, a matching anger was evident in her strange voice. “The sea would have swallowed you had I not interfered!”   
  


“Wai--” Lou began, but the creature cut her off.   
  


“Maybe that is what you deserve, you young, ignorant land walker!” She turned away before Lou could respond, swimming further out into the fog and towards the sea.  
  


Lou ran to the end of the dock. “Wait! I’m sorry.” The figure in the water stopped, but didn’t turn back. She looked like a dream through the mist, but Lou called out again. “If you’re the one who saved me I have to thank you, don’t I? What is… do you have a name?”  
  


She turned back to face Lou and in the distance it looked like her expression was blank, but she didn’t look angry at least. “I am Kiga.” Her voice carried through the distance like a rolling wave. She paused, and Lou felt as if she was being examined, like she had just auditioned and was being judged on stage. “You look much like your grandmother Helen. I think of her often.”   
  


Lou felt like her knees might give out right then and there, and she sat cross-legged on the end of the dock in lieu of falling over. She watched as Kiga swam closer now, emerging through the mist like something mythical. “You knew my grandmother.” It wasn’t a question, as she said she knew it had to be true, it felt right in her bones. “What do you remember of her?”   
  


Kiga smiled, and it looked fond, despite the row of sharp triangular teeth Lou could see in her mouth. She stopped swimming, leaving five feet or so between them. “Helen was a remarkable woman. I knew her when I was young, she was young as well. We swam together often and we spoke for hours of the day. She told me of her family, of her mother and father, and then later she spoke of her husband.” Lou thought she heard a sadness in Kiga’s voice at the mention of her Grandfather. “I watched them wed from this shoreline. It was a beautiful ceremony.”  
  


Lou nodded but wasn't sure what to say or where to even start. Kiga seemed distant, as if lost in her memories, but she continued speaking.   
  


“I did not see her often when Richard was here, and when he left she was inconsolable. It was,” she paused, “painful to see her that way. I loved her… very much. She has been gone a long time.”  
  


Lou watched Kiga’s expression shift from serene memory to grief and she could tell the truth of the statement. In that moment Lou wished more than ever to speak one last time with Grandma Helen, if only to stop her breaking this poor person’s heart. “It's been almost twenty years. I miss her too. It was always her who brought me here, it still feels strange without her here with me.” Lou watched the sea. The fog had begun to clear throughout their conversation, and she could see a good half a mile out to sea through the curling vapor now. “I'm okay, by the way.” She gestured to her chest, “I feel half crushed, but the ocean will do that to you. I suppose I'm lucky you saved me.”  
  


Kiga smiled, close lipped, and looked over her shoulder. Lou heard something out in the sea, beyond the quickly clearing fog; something like a whale song. Kiga looked back towards Lou. “I have to go, my sisters are calling.” She moved without another word, quickly disappearing below the water. Lou had just enough time to be shocked before Kiga appeared again, a dozen feet further out. “Can we speak again, Lou?” Kiga called, “I would like to be friends.”   
  


Lou watched her, blue and white mottled skin, smiling silhouetted by the newly risen sun. She thought about this creature, this woman, spending decades just off shore, loving a woman she could never have. Lou nodded. “Yeah.” She called. “You know where to find me.”   
  


Lou kept watching as Kiga smiled again and disappeared beneath the surface. 

* * *

 

 __“The love that stood a moment in your eyes,  
The words that lay a moment on your tongue,  
Are one with all that in a moment dies,  
A little under-said and over-sung.  
But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies  
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.”

**_I Shall Go Back Again to the Bleak Shore - Edna St. Vincent Millay_ **

**Author's Note:**

> I took a liberty with fisher _man_ but I hope this was still an enjoyable gift for you to read. 
> 
>  
> 
> The title and end quote are from the Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet "I shall go back again to the bleak shore" which can be read [here](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148562/i-shall-go-back-again-to-the-bleak-shore).


End file.
